The Glad Game

Even a daughter of darkness can look on the bright side

Maybe it's Uranus's placement in my birth chart... I identify as Trad Goth. Left utterly to my own devices, I like it dark, moody, and candlelit. My favorite aesthetic is haunted mansion and my favorite (non) color is black. Goth can be a heavy burden as a lifestyle choice. Like the borrowed name implies, you have to have a certain outsider-warrior spirit to maintain it. You also have to find that rare economic circumstance where bottle black hair, skull tattoos, spiked dog collars, and black lace as everyday garb don't ensure you starve on the street. I gave up Trad Goth by the time I was in my early 40s. I don't even wear high heels anymore. Fishnets are out of the question; I refuse to stay out past 10pm unless it is a dire emergency.

Not like it matters... we are all Goths these days. Goth attire has become a symptom of our civilization. I wear combat boots but so does every semi-cool 11 year old. As far as Goth-as-affectation is concerned, sarcasm, the f word, and elitist dismissal of the obsessions of pop culture are now commonplace. Goth ennui is appealing but exhausting. Goth is at least honest about death but it gets tired... life is for the living.

Silver F̶i̶l̶l̶i̶n̶g̶s̶  Linings

The hardest thing to do in life is to find the silver lining to the cloud. True, transcendent positivity is the most occulted subject in the world. I recently had to take my mom to a string of dentist appointments after being slaughtered by taxes from all ends -- there are reasons I have been condemning dentists for their grift with extra vigor lately -- and it would be very, very easy to sink into negativity like a comforting smallpox blanket. Between the dentist's high cost, unnecessary X-rays, and his pushy receptionist, this particular allopath would have put the old me into a tailspin of irritation and anger. Instead of focusing on present-and-accounted-for grift, rudeness, and idiocy, I have chosen to fight the uphill battle to largely ignore the bad and be thankful for the good. I am thankful my Mom's procedures went off without a hitch. I am thankful for the dentist's competence. I am thankful for the modern insistence on a hygienic environment in medical situations. I am thankful for local anesthetics and laughing gas. I am thankful that I live in a semi-urban place where decent specialists must compete with one another in order to get patients. I acknowledge the negatives without dwelling on them. Perhaps next time, we can find a dentist who does not pile on extra X-rays out of weaponized incompetence and who has a polite, respectful receptionist.

Remember we are biologically wired to remember the negative. If we blotted out the negative, our species would never have made it out of the amoeba stage. Being an animal is tough. Survival is nasty and amoral. If you don't remember the pain falling out of a tree, you are likely to do it again and again until you die. Humans are animals too.  

Dysmorphia

When a person cannot play the Glad Game with her own appearance, she becomes dysmorphic.  I have been dysmorphic about the lower part of my face and my weight for most of my life.  Instead of appreciating my braces-straightened teeth and having no health problems with chewing or swallowing, I have often wanted to change what my lower face looks like out of unhappiness.  Instead of appreciating my powerful legs -- I can leg press 300 pounds! -- I fixated for years on my chubby, flabby knees and my assortment of cellulite patterns.  Lots of people are dysmorphic whether or not they admit to it.  Celebrities and influencers of our era put it all in the open.  They get ghastly surgeries and procedures.  Last decade, the trend is to get your fat completely removed via liposuction.  For awhile, the trend was the Brazilian Butt Lift, which lifts nothing and involves having body fat removed from the belly area and re-injected to create bulbous mounds on each butt cheek.  Another current trend has people reinjecting butt or belly fat into their faces, which means whenever they overeat or become hormonally imbalanced, their faces will swell.  Yikes.  I am extremely relieved I didn't have the money or the wherewithal to go down the slippery slope of "treatments" for my flaws.  

There is no money to be made on a person who looks at her face, sees acne, asymmetry, overlarge or over-small features, and shrugs and says "Meh.  My nose may be funny looking and my teeth may be 3 different colors, but my smile is genuine and puts people at ease.  I'll ignore my nose and try to smile more."

All advertising depends on people who are dissatisfied with themselves and their lives.  Home Depot would be out of business if average people chose to make the best out of what they were given instead of lusting after shiny, giant kitchens and vaulted ceilings in the master bedroom.  In the Boomer era, a family of six often lived in a two bedroom house with a single shared bathroom and was not considered poor.  The modern counterpart of the same family of six is dissatisfied because their house lacks an in-ground pool and a three car garage.  

Weaponized Shame

Women especially tend to wallow in shame and regret when playing the Glad Game is too subtle or too much work.  This is not to say men don't wallow in shame and regret too, I am just writing what I know as a woman.  Women live in fear of being shamed and outcast from groups.  The most awful among us use shame as a weapon to keep others in line.  As William Blake said, you become what you behold.  Those who use shame as a weapon are usually running away from their own shadow selves and are afraid to face their own shameful acts.  Women tend to have a monopoly on weaponized shame because mothers are the setters of limits for their children. Scolding ensures a child's survival -- without it, a child easily becomes a dysfunctional, depressed, dopamine-addicted brat.  Shame is a form of self-regulation: when in balance, it inspires diligence, creativity, and productivity.  Those who do not or cannot play the Glad Game become self-toxic and self-hating.  The self becomes septic because it is our biological predisposition to remember and amplify negativity.  Shame is pushed outward and as a consequence, travels inward.  As above, so below.  The heavy lifting of all work from physical to spiritual involves identifying the good and amplifying it until it becomes a mighty fortress unto itself.  Imagine if the shamers actually developed talents within themselves they could actually be proud of...

Why Allopathic Medicine is Mostly Useless

Aside from getting an ingrown toenail excised or a broken arm set, I would rather die of whatever ails me than visit an allopathic doctor's office for treatment.  Allopaths largely view Nature as the enemy.  They think that manmade replacements of Nature's failures are the answer.  They fetishize avatars of human beings: unrealistic caricatures of what humans should and would be in a perfect world. Babies and little children are pumped full of brain and body damaging vaccines because of the aforementioned beliefs.  "Tech will save us!" rallies the allopathic ignoramus, and he refuses to see the lights of intelligence blown away into darkness when he administers triple and quadruple vaccines into a child's arm.  He refuses to watch Vaxxed for fear of a mild itch that indicates he still has a conscience.  Of course vaccines aren't the only way innocents have their potential for normal, fulfilling lives stolen away by collective allopathic ignorance.  

Nowhere is allopathic medicine more damaging than in the arena of chronic disease.  A healed patient is a non-existent customer and everyone, especially your doctor, knows it.  The allopathic answer to a heart attack is a stent or series of stents and a pacemaker.  Kidney disease?  Get on a list for a transplant and have a machine take the job of cleaning your blood via dialysis.  Diabetes?  Metaformin and synthetic insulin.  Cancer?  Declare war and use chemicals that resemble napalm to "cleanse" the body.

The first rule of good health is YOU MUST BUILD STRENGTH to overcome disease.  It is sad this needs to be said, but you don't build strength by eating crappy, factory-farmed food and Jell-O after being drugged up and having chunks of organs removed from your body.  You begin with cleaning up the patient's diet and then grow from there. Allopathic medicine is obsessed with amputation and replacement.  Healing, as Hippocrates said, comes from food first.  Removing a body organ or part should only be a last and final resort.  

Allopaths have completely lost the ability and knowledge of working with the patient's existing strengths.  Instead, they lap up whatever is thrown their way from pharmaceutical companies.  They are of a lower class than whores.  At least prostitution is a somewhat honest profession that provides relief to its customers every now and then.

Framed Another Way...

I am a piano teacher.  Imagine if I took the same kind of negative approach to my job as an allopathic physician.  Instead of recognizing my student's natural ability, my interaction with them (for which I would be paid handsomely, of course) would consist of five distracted minutes where I mumbled some nonsense about the magnificence of Chopin and blamed them for their current state because they weren't practicing enough. My sole contribution to helping them learn piano (other than the five minute diagnosis) would be a prescription for Adderall sent to their local pharmacy to help them concentrate.  Nice!  No wonder they would want to sue me.

Parents who ignore or punish their children without recognizing their achievements are jerks.  When a parent constantly berates a child for his shortcomings and cannot lift a finger to help that child discover his unique talents, the parent is considered abusive and rightly so.  

Instead of fighting in self-dug trenches, I seek to build what is good in myself, for I am a better person than I was yesterday, if only by the slightest amount.  It does not matter how small my goodness happens to be, how awful I have been, or how retarded I am in general.  I find the goodness and I focus on it after a brief acknowledgement of the negative.  Said the drop of water that became the trickle that became the river that carved the Grand Canyon... "You've got to start somewhere".